Neil, as far as I'm concerned, people can keep on going with their excessive carbon dioxide production if they want to. Let them do it. Let them speed up this process SO much that they have no time to evacuate the coastal cities, in fact. If people want to do that to themselves, then so be it. The US produces excessive amounts of carbon for its size and the number of people who live here. We don't have to. In fact, we're being incredibly stupid. Maybe it's our increasingly poor education system, or perhaps it's religious or rightwing fanaticism at work, I don't know.

You see, being 'green' and efficient saves money. In the long run, it saves quite a BIT of money. People are just short-sighted and impatient these days. They want cheap and fast, they don't want to shell out more now to get higher returns later. I definitely blame religious fanaticism for some of that--people who think they're going to get sucked up into heaven soon don't care if they leave a mess behind when it happens. The rest is pure fear of change--people just want to keep doing things the way they're used to, instead of doing them better.

Whenever things start to go bad, people look for scapegoats. Our snakes are just one of those scapegoats right now. It would be too difficult to REALLY go after the biggest polluters, so they're dinking around with tiny little BS and pretending to do something.